Bodegas Portia: A very Wired winery

This article was taken from the February 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

Wine-making might seem a bucolic pursuit, but to churn out a
million bottles a year you need to get industrial. So when Norman
Foster and his team were commissioned to design Bodegas Portia, a
12,500-square-metre winery for the Faustino Group in the Ribera del
Duero region of Spain, he sought nature's help in cutting the
energy bill.

Each of the building's three sections houses one stage of
production. The first (above) is for fermentation and is kitted out
with sensors to detect carbon dioxide. If levels become dangerously
high, doors open to vent the gas. Barrelling and bottling happen in
the other wings, which are sunk into the ground to keep
temperatures cool (and the wine delicioso). "Many modern wineries are lightweight
[overground] structures," explains Pedro Haberbosch, 48, a partner
and architect at Foster + Partners. "You need air conditioning if
it gets too hot. It's very energy intensive."

And with gargantuan ambitions come gargantuan volumes of grapes
-- 1.3 million tonnes a year -- all of which need to be transported
via treatment machines into the fermentation
vats. So the architects devised a sloped reinforced roof.
Trucks drive up it and drop their loads at the highest point, after
which gravity takes the grapes through a system of hoppers and
ramps -- but not too many of them. "The less you mechanically
damage the grapes from vineyard to tank, the greater the likelihood
of a quality wine," says Haberbosch. Here's to the future.